Assessing and Designing a Generic Learning Evaluation Model from Art and Historical Museums Based on GLOs Model

Learning in museums can be studied in two specific and generic fields; the generic learning covers overall aspects of visitors and their relationship and interaction with the museum and its collections, artistic and historical materials. The specific learning shows increase in the extent of knowledge about a special material or issue which has been presented in the museum or historical site. In order to enhance the level of visitors’ learning in the museum, it is important to measure the amount of learning in the status quo; there are some different indicators of occurrence of learning in formal and informal educational settings proposed by educational psychologists. Learning and museum theorists have also defined some indicators as the signs of occurring learning in informal settings especially in museums and have named them “Learning Impacts or Outcomes”; GLOs or Generic Learning Outcomes is the name of a project which has been done by Hooper-Greenhill et al. at the University of Leicester in order to introduce a model for measuring learning outcomes in museums, archives and libraries. It has extracted five domains of (1) increase in knowledge and understanding; (2) increase in skills;(3) change in attitudes or values; (4) enjoyment, inspiration, creativity; (5) action, behavior, progression, from an extensive research project. An exact study on GLOs features along with a review of other similar papers and research projects about the outcomes of learning or interpretation in an informal educational or learning settings as well as historical and cultural sites and the quality and quantity of evaluating and measuring them shows that they can be categorized into three affective, behavioral and cognitive domains. Although many studies have been done related to this issue, and they often focus on defining these indicators and there is almost no clear and determined method in order to use them for measuring learning and recognizing its outcomes and indicators in a real museum context. Also, it is impossible to evaluate the learning in a museum without considering different effective factors on this process because learning is an ambiguous concept to define and a multidimensional phenomenon on which many different known and unknown factors can have an impact. Although controlling all effective variables is not possible in a research design, recognizing some of important variables in the museum space and including them in the research design might be a useful method by reviewing the previous studies. In this regard, this research aims to propose a practical plan and design as well as a useful instrument for measuring generic learning outcomes in museums. To do so, it reviews the research background about learning indicators and learning domains as well as effective factors onthe learning in museum. The paper uses a qualitative and descriptive research method. According to the proposed research design, the influence of three groups of factors, i.e., factors ofthe museum, individual and social factors of visitors can be measured on the generic learning and its three domains.